When a motorized transport buyer is shopping for new motorized transports online, the current shopping experience is designed to give a consumer a general idea of what an automotive dealer's motorized transport inventory may look like. Typically, an automotive dealer's website will show a stock photo of every new motorized transport in inventory, but not of the actual motorized transports on the dealer lot. A stock photo is a licensed image sold by a third party and is used to generically represent what a motorized transport might look like. Unfortunately, the stock photos may not have the same factory options and/or colors as the actual motorized transports on the dealer's lot.
A motorized transport shopper also may elect to go to the motorized transport manufacturer's website to virtually build their motorized transport. This approach will often result in a CGI (Computer Generated Image) that fails to give the buyer a sense of “ownership” as it's only a cartoon and quite obviously not an actual photograph. Additionally, these manufacturers' websites often have a computer generated 360 degree views of interior and exterior images. Unfortunately, this computer generated 360 degree images also lack genuine realism, resulting in less than desirable results.
As a result of this growing online shopping, there is a push from several different large groups in the automotive industry to use of actual images of motorized transports in a dealer's inventory on the website on the Internet, so a consumer can get a true representation of what they can expect to see if they go to visit the dealer. These groups believe an overwhelming majority of consumers want to see actual images of motorized transports versus stock photos when shopping for new motorized transports online at the dealer's website.
In response to these trends, dealers are beginning to recognize the need for actual images and have begun using their own in-house, used-motorized transport photographers to take pictures of their new motorized transport inventory. These photographers must capture the images of each new motorized transport, manually upload the images to an FTP site, and link them to the dealer stock number. Some of these dealers have even invested significant capital in photo studios to improve upon digital media content quality. Unfortunately, the result is the same because these photographers are not able to keep up with capturing all of the needed images for the constantly changing new motorized transport inventory and the currently available image management software has no effective mechanism for solving this issue. As a result, these dealers often still have and use stock photos on their websites for a large portion of their new motorized transport inventory. Additionally, the media content quality of the images of the actual motorized transport inventory is often of poor and similarly the currently available image management software has no effective mechanism for identifying and solving this issue.
To adjust for these missing actual images, these dealers are considering CGI images as an alternative. This appears to be an attractive option for them because it avoids the cost of transporting actual vehicles for photo shoots and significantly reduces the overhead required, but again results in an inaccurate representation to online shoppers. Additionally, even with this CGI technology the existing image management software is unable to even effectively identify and utilize these CGI images.